you see the size difference, it's a little hard to fit in there. but this this i want to introduce bob fenton, the response head for fema coming in from dc to help support this and moderate the panel. thank you. (applause). >> well, appreciate it. appreciate the opportunity to be back with friends and back in san francisco. and i appreciate the opportunity to be your lunch speaker. as i always say, lunch is one of may five most important meals of the day so thank you for that. let me introduce my panelists. here to my left, we have a great group here to talk about stories from the field with regard to fire and 10 years of lessons learned being applied. first to my left, ray chaney, cal fire incident battle xwrupb chief. to his left, colonel laura yeager, 40th combat aviation brigade. to her left,

commander steve everett, to his left lieutenant colonel dana, marine corps installation west. thank you. let me go ahead and start off by talking a little bit and just going back over some of the discussions yesterday that i think are going to play into this discussion. we had vice admiral beeman talk a little bit yesterday about capabilities and vice admiral zunkoff talked about partnerships, unity of effort, unity of command. mayor lee talked about dod efforts, expertise, community efforts and as we go into all those discussions today you will see

best practices applied during the 10 years from those fires. i have the pleasure of working for administrator fuget in fema headquarters. fema's role is to coordinate response between state and local governments and his focus, his direction to us really comes down it 3 things. he asks us to always plan for the worst case, the maximum of the maximums and it's go to see the department of defense is incorporating this within the catastrophe policy that was spoken about a little earlier. no. 2, he asked us to sppbld and are able to stabilize an incident within 72 hours. his mantra is think big, go big, go fast but not fast. 3, he asks us to do this within a whole community approach, not only it make sure we utilize the whole community

in the response because there's much more responders past the federal-state responders. there's the public being responders and there's many others, private industry need to be in that so we try to integrate that into a whole community concept. and also to make sure when we respond we respond to take into account the whole community. not everybody looks like me and you but we need to be able to take into account and service our elderly, infants and others that may need special assistance. with that, the purpose of this working lunch is to present vied a forum to discuss lessons learned and corrective actions taken over the past decade with years of focus on dod support to civilian authority with relation to wild fires. populations continue to spread

into formerly wild areas i want to focus on how our capacity on wild land fire has improved over the past decade. in getting ready for this discussion, i did have the opportunity to participate in the 2003-2007 wild fires, i went back and looked at a lot of lessons learned, the governor's blue panel commission report looked at also a lot of those kind of things and what i did was just put a picture up there to show you the 2007 wild fires. when we get to these major wild fires, we're talking about multiple wild fires and almost what you would call a fire storm. a lot of the lessons learned there are in bullets from just 2007. why this discussion is important and lessons learned up there, the 2007 fires burned

a little over 500,000 acres, destroyed over 3200 structures and caused 10 fatalities. so why this is important, as you start to read the fire weather reports that justin talked about as we go into this fall, the experts are predicting above normal significant fire potential across the northwest quarter of the united states. those of you who live in southern california are used to a phenomenon called the santa ana winds. when you take into account dry conditions, we're in the part of the year when those winds start to change directions, we do have the opportunity for significant fire events throughout the california area. so, with that, what i'd like to do is kind of focus our discussion on 3 major areas.. command and control, relationships and resources. with that, let me start off with the first question, we got a lot of discussion yesterday about command and control. i

just wanted to give an opportunity for our panelists to talk about when a fire occurs within california and what is the system that you respond on in california and who is in charge of that fire and what happens when those fires grow into multiple fires as we've seen in 2003 and 2007 and how do you manage multiple fires and get the resources to the right place and organize that not only at the fire but the operations centers that support that? so if i could look down my panelists and maybe, ray, if you want to take a shot at that. >> can you hear me? thanks, robert. from a california perspective with respect to wildland fires, interestingly enough in 1991 the largest fatal wild fire incident occurred just down the road here in oakland with a santa anna wind event. some of you may be familiar with that. within california we utilize

an approach of local jurisdictions, state jurisdiction and federal jurisdiction, depending on the area and whoever has authority. with respect to cal fire, we are the third largest fire department in the nation and the largest in california with over 7,000 uniformed employees. we also have the largest aerial fire fighting nreed in the world. so typically when a large disaster type fire occurs, we are usually rendering aid, not asking for aid. so when we get into a situation when we get to that level, what we call mega fires is the new term we're using, we're reach a certain draw down level or certain criteria, we reach out to our military coordinators, hence our agreement with the third nraet and the one map locally in san francisco under ir

cal fire prides itself on a statistic that we contain 97 percent of all wild fires in california with 10 acres or less and we do this with an aggressive report of incidents, even with a 911 call of smoepk with land, air and ground attack. once fires become to a large enough scale we call mue tour aid, california lass a great mue tour aid system. i think it's looked at nationally because we have souch excellent cooperation with our cooperating agencies. once it reaches that point, the team will come in and assist the local jurisdiction to run that incident. when we start having multiple fires in a certain area, then we get into what we call area command. i think that provides

the overview. >> i talked a little bit about mou's and relationships with the marines. maybe we can talk about how is the national guard and dod resources and capabilities integrated into the command and control at the fire and also the supporting ops centers whether it be the gac or other centers down there. maybe our military personnel can talk about that, or ray. >> it's important to note that we are the supporting effort to cal fire and we get called in when they are basically out of assets. we are working for cal fire, they are the incident commanders, we follow their coordination, typically we're the last ones in and the first ones out. we do have an on-going relationship with cal fire, i'm in contact with cal fire all the time. we have good situational awareness what's going on in the state of california. they normally put

us in an alert stat us so we're prepared to respond in an attack mode. i don't often work with chief chaney in southern california, about a month ago we had 9 aircraft at our peak working fires throughout northern california if that answers your question. >> any other responses? >> i wanted to touch -- can you hear me now? i wanted to touch on that last topic as far as the command control because what we have here in the marine corps is similar to the navy. we have the installation, the regional installation command and also partners with the operational foresite. we allow the operational foresight, we

maintain those but then we coordinate, cooperate, with the operational foresight once the call comes in for support. so we're able to do that obviously through memorandum of understandings and we have agreements and our wing operating orders allow for the fact the operational control, at least under operational response, maintains with the operators. the third aircraft wing maintains operational control but we send our operatives out to be controlled by the civic sight. we're comfortable with that and that's matured a lot in the last couple years. >> talked a lot about command and control and agreements and moving resources. one other question that came up yesterday we were discussing yesterday is how do communications occur specifically with regard to when we start talking about air ops and moving air resources around, how do we ensure that we have that interoperatability

that we discussed so much yesterday between the different components. >> can you hear me now? perfect. it all begins with preplanning and strategic planning ahead of time. how our agreements at a local level were born was out of the 2003 cedar fire. the cedar fire was about 280,000 acres. as an example, i have the dubious distinction of being one of the first chief officers at the scene of that incident. just to give you an idea, at peak the cedar fire was burning 30,000 acres an hour. so that's about 9 acres a second. so something probably as large as this ship in one second. so after post-cedar fire, we recognized the navy had assets and the marine had assetness

region that we should capitalize on, so i was tasked by my chief to organize a local letter of agreement so that we could, with the objective, essentially, was to streamline access to dods assets in rapid fashion and by rapid i mean within hours. if we're dealing with the level of incident that i just described, the cedar fire was essentially over in 12 hours. it started about 5:00 that night, it actually took off and started running at 11:00 at night, by 9:00 that morning it was at the gates of marine corps station miramar and it was essentially stopped. dska is an excellent tool but we needed to go a rapid route, which is ir we'll talk about training later, but that's a big component.

and the colonel hit on a good part about we use persistent forecasting and weather forecasting to look at when we have these fire weather red flag warning stand in the wind events. i start reaching out to my counterparts with third fleet and lieutenant colonel demigan giving them a heads up. we (inaudible) navy and marine corps assets when we have severe weather events take place because we know if we're going to have that severe weather event, we could have one of those mega fires. we have a complex air space management tool. i'm the equivalent of a fact a, i fly in the ob10 bronco as a fact a and my job is to coordinate air

space. we're dropping water and fire retardant instead of bombs and rockets. we work closely with cal guard, navy and marine corps aviation. we do that with squadron training. we still have khal lefrpg wills, i'm not going to lie to you. we have issues where tactical to air communication is difficult. cal guard, we purchased the radios for national guard aircraft and they installed them in their aircraft so we have robust communications with california national guard, with navy and marine corps it's still a work in progress. we have a work around with that with respect to tactical communications and we use coordinating helicopters to handle air to ground

tactical situations and that is relayed to the aircraft that are in trail. it's not perfect but it's a work around and it keeps everybody in the fight. >> prior to 20011 2011 the navy fire fighting capability was concentrated in one squadron. in 2011 it began to expand to other helicopter squadrons. one consequence of that would be multiple squadrons providing aircraft to cal fire to support the fire fighting effort and one somewhat simple but very effective solution was the use of defense connect on line, the dco chat room. basically cal fire personnel, along with all the individual squadrons, all connected realtime able to communicate and coordinate both from the squadron and also on

scene. >> well, thank you. let's go ahead and move into relationships. we had a significant discussion yesterday about relationships and again the highlighted and supervisor chiu's comments this morning. how do we ensure they are enduring past the past couple years. >> as general speese said yesterday, we are here for the long time. on the installation side which we coordinate with cal fire and the navy we have annual exercise and we hit that every springtime prior to the fire season. i think what's also, it's important to remember that although it was stressed, the military members are members of the community as well so let's not forget that as far as active duty. although we're transient in nature, sometimes we're in deployment, many of us

are home owners and we live in that community. we are part of that community as well. just like the guard, we have an interest in protecting our friends and neighbors. sustainment is, it's important to us and we'll maintain it especially on the region side. we're able to have these long-standing relationships while the operating force side goes forward and supports the on-going efforts, we are able to stay back here and sustain those relationships. >> just to follow on that, the navy squadrons that provide fire fighting capability are a combination of active and reserve components. one benefit of reserve components is more longevity is pilots in the squadrons. you may have people who have been there for 6, 7 years and have seen

multiple fires. that mutual trust is absolutely essential to this capability. >> a couple things that come it mind real briefly, we're talking about wild and land fires primarily but rest assured amongst the group here we're always thinking in an all rest capacity. cal fire's mission is we are the state's fire department. we are thinking about all risk missions whether it's fire, flood, natural or man made disaster, whatever the case may be. some of the great dialogue we had yesterday, one of the scenarios i envision, there's a couple scenarios that i have heard before keep me up at night and one of those is the 7.8 in the la basin. conceptually one of the things we could look at is a mass of casualties to decompress the la hospitals in that event. so we're thinking in an all risk capacity.

relationships are about mutual respect which we covet, especially in the dod realm. we do that through training and meeting together. one of our things we're very proud of is on an annual basis we get together and we conduct a 3-day training exercise as well as squadron level training: the first day of the exercise is a telecon exercise to make sure when they pick up the phone they are talking to the commander, whether it's navy or marine corps. we discuss our local letters of agreement, what they can and cannot do, how we stay within the box of dsca and ir and what the

culmination is with a fire drop where we're dropping watter. we conduct aircrew briefings simply because cal fire recognizes that you great folks have a primary mission, that's defense of the nation and we respect that and we understand this is an ancillary job and there is a high revel of rotation of people coming back from afghanistan or iraq, whatever the case may be, but we also reach out to squadron level training. it really comes down to meeting with your cooperating agencies and training together on a frequent basis and having good and open dialogue. >> as i look back at that map here, knowing we were heading into that time of year where we're going to hit significant fire weather and knowing northern california as we are now but eventually southern california, one of the most effective ways to stop the

fires from growing is that initial attack, which means we need to be able to quickly put resources up in the air and move them. i guess my question is from a national guard perspective, from a naval perspective, with the helicopter resources down there, do you feel you would be able to quickly move those resources and you have the agreements in place. we'll start with the national guard and work on our way down. >> although we're advertised as a one week a month and two weekends a year, i've got crews on pretty much every day and if cal fire calls i can get crews out in just a matter of hours. we did do that about two months ago, the robbers fire, and it worked out real well. cal fire went in real aggressive and put

out the fire in a short period of time. so there's no issue with us being immediately available, we've got our buckets, crew trained. >> as an example of that, 2007 we saw -- 2003 we had the cedar fire and we all thought the cedar fire in 2003 was a fluke. it was the first mega fire that california really experienced. and we thought, well, it will be, that's a career fire, that will be it. then 2007 came around. in 2007 we had another fire siege, same weather scenario, but we didn't have one cedar fire, we had five of them just in my county alone so we were inundated by a large scale disaster in 2007. as an example of our agreement and the efficiency of that agreement is we had orders to

(inaudible) at 0000 that day. that's a 4 hour activation time and that shows the dedication and effort to leaning forward to the mission with these agreements that we can have a 4-hour activation. i've been in this business a while and i'll say that's unprecedented with any civilian emergency services agency going to a dod asset and having it engage in 4 hours. >> commander, anything you want to share? >> more recently in 2012, two squadrons provided 3 aircraft and the notification process was approximately 2 to 3 hours. we have expanded the capability in the navy, as i said earlier, and that allows for that rapid surge response which was put to the test in

august. >> on this most recent lightning complex fire, it was a little bit different for us as far as what happened there. like cal fire wants to, just like we all do, is aggressively attack things. but we have the applicable policies and orders that really regulate us a little bit because it's got to meet certain thresholds and sometimes like in this last one, it was a remote fire, very small, but it didn't meet some of the thresholds initially but we postured and as soon as it crossed the line they were ready to attack it aggressively. those are challenges we have to work with as well but we're ready to provide that immediate response when necessary. >> we talked a little bit so far about training exercises but maybe from the navy perspective, the marine perspective, the national guard, what training exercises are you doing right now to

integrate with cal fire or other local governments to make sure that we're ready for this fire season? >> well, as far as i expressed earlier, we have the springtime exercise. that was our fifth annual one. we will obviously continue that through. just like we were speaking about yesterday, maturing the process in our relationships as well. what we're doing here is again in a typical marine corps fashion, we're going to move this forward into a more combined arms event. we have been previously doing the aviation operations but now we do have a robust capability within the one map on the air in aviation site on the ground piece as well as far as we have built in the plan as far as getting dozers, things like that, the logistical piece and making it a more robust exercise. initially what we looked

forward to was on the initial capabilities exercise, the initial day, is to build a lot more friction into it. it's working through the orders. what constitutes the approval to enter into action. we can't just go at the call, it has to meet the threshold but we want to be able to attack aggressively and meet the intended desire but, again, we're going to build that within next year's springtime exercise. >> thank you. let's go ahead and move over to a discussion of resources and there's a number of resources that dod brings to bear whether it's personnel or equipment or systems that they have. as i look back to my experience with the 2003-2007 fires, the one that stands out to me is the use and integration of helicopters. i can remember after the 2003 helicopters doing a field hearing with

duncan hunter about the integration of helicopters and how better to integrate them. there's been a lot of discussion about that but do you feel we're ready this year and we are able to integrate those capabilities not only from a command control perspective but from a communications perspective for this fire season? anyone want to elaborate on that? >> can you hear me? okay, perfect. yes, we feel we're confident that we have, the bottom line is any aviator knows safety is paramount. we greatly respect navy, marine corps and guard safety policy. cal fire has an aviation policy as well. we work cooperatively with the agencies here at the table to ensure when we are engaged in an aerial fire fighting event we are working within each

other's policies. we have trained in a work around, we can do close air support with navy and marine corps aircraft, with the current system we have. would we like to improve upon it? absolutely. we have gone very high up in the organization to try and look at getting the r210 radio modified to the point where it can work on our vhf spectrums, that's one of our challenges we need to move forward with. but overall we're confident when we do call upon dod assets to integrate with civilian aircraft, the training regimen we put forth will keep aircrews safe and also have them be effective. there was a lot of questions from a political level as well as a public level. you've got aircraft sitting at north island, just launch them, get them in the fight. it was hard to explain to them that that's a very delicate air space when you have fixed wing and rotary wing sharing the same air